Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

And then, as Chester and his posse got off their bikes, the whole huge crowd burst into applause.

“Let’s do it!” shouted Ellis Walters, yelling through cupped hands from the back of the crowd. “Let’s save Taproot Valley!”

Chester couldn’t help but notice the one person who was not a part of this giant crowd—his best friend, Victor Glebe. Well, no time to worry about it now. Chester turned his mind to making fresh plans: Natasha would need to build more people into her choreography; Kevin could add more harmony parts to the song….

Chester turned to Todd Spolin, who happened to be standing beside him, and said, “We’re going to need more snacks.”

What Ida Finkleman should have been doing, at that moment, was writing quiz questions. Like every teacher in school, she had two weeks to prepare an entire week’s worth of questions, a massively time-consuming proposition. But here she was instead, watching thoughtfully through the chain-link fence that separated Patterson Lane from Tamarkin Reservoir. She watched as the kids unrolled the long, beautiful murals that Marisol and Lisa had painted and strung them carefully from the trees. She watched Braxton put on his grizzly bear costume, backward, then watched him take it off and put it on again correctly. She watched Tenny coach Todd on how to place his fingers on the guitar, to pretend to play the solo he’d recorded. She watched Chester set up the shots and cry “Action!” When the Save Taproot Valley song came blaring out of Shelly’s laptop, Ms. Finkleman noted the compositional virtuosity that Kevin had brought to the project and chuckled at Rory’s strained but charming rhyme of the words “bonfire” and “quagmire.”

Surely this video would be, if not brilliant, at least utterly unique. But whether it would raise enough money to send the kids on their outdoor education trip was a very different question. Four thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six dollars was a lot of money, and the scheduled departure date was less than two weeks away.

Ms. Finkleman turned from the fence and walked back down Patterson Lane, toward the school, to get her car and drive home.

If only there was something she could do to help.

While all the other kids were at Tamarkin Reservoir, no doubt having the time of their lives, Bethesda Fielding biked home alone. No one besides Tenny had even told her about the Save Taproot Valley project, let alone invited her, and she was trying very hard not to be bummed about it. Bethesda loved fund-raising projects! When she was nine, she’d made almost a hundred dollars in four hours of selling lemonade, by having kids pay an extra dollar to squeeze the lemons themselves, using a shiny silver handheld juicer. Less work, more money!

Bethesda chastised herself sternly: Does Sherlock Holmes get jealous? What about Charlie Chan? Does Wellington Wolf, Jungle P.I., get all mopey because he can’t play with the other animals! Of course not! Why do you think they call them lone wolves?

Chortling at her own joke, Bethesda didn’t notice until the last second a garbage can that had tipped over and rolled out onto the sidewalk. She jerked the handlebars of her blue Schwinn, lurched hard, and almost hit another cyclist who was passing her on the right.

“Hey! Watch it!” said the other girl, glaring backward over her shoulder.

It was Reenie Maslow. Of course.

“Shoot. Sorry, Reenie.”

Bethesda pumped her legs a few times, giving herself a burst of speed to catch up. Her self–pep talk notwithstanding, Bethesda was psyched to have someone else to talk to. “So,” she said, pulling up to keep pace with Reenie, “you weren’t invited to do this video thing either, huh?”

“Of course I was. Everyone was. I just didn’t have time.”

Well, gee, Bethesda thought. Thanks for making me feel better.

They biked in silence for a couple minutes, Bethesda struggling the whole time to think of something else to say, Reenie just staring straight ahead, the sun gleaming off her silver helmet. When Bethesda turned off Friedman Street onto Dunwiddie, Reenie did too. Whoa, thought Bethesda. Two short, book-loving, glasses-wearing girls with reddish-tannish hair who live in the same neighborhood! And yet…

“So, what, are you, like, following me?” Reenie asked abruptly, shooting Bethesda an annoyed look.

“No! Reenie, I… I…”

Reenie stood up on her pedals, knapsack balanced high on her back like a soldier’s duffel, cranked her legs, and zoomed away. Bethesda rolled to a stop and watched her disappear over the horizon.

At home, Bethesda took a Snapple and a bowlful of graham crackers from the kitchen and went upstairs to do homework. Mr. Galloway was giving extra credit to anyone who memorized the Gettysburg Address. But try as she might, Bethesda couldn’t get past the “conceived in liberty” part.

Three little letters kept dancing through her mind: IOM.

To the student body, Principal Van Vreeland’s proposed Week of a Thousand Quizzes was a grossly unfair punishment; to most of the teachers, it was a huge and unwelcome task. But to Harry Melville, who taught sixth- and seventh-grade Social Studies, it was a dream come true. Some people were good at dancing, while others drove race cars or wrote poems or performed complicated surgeries. Mr. Melville’s gift was for writing difficult test questions, and this was his moment to shine.

Since the principal’s announcement, he had spent every evening here in his small, comfortable home, settled in a wingback chair behind his rolltop desk, carefully crafting the most delightfully difficult Social Studies questions he could. Which states voted to ratify the United States Constitution, and which did not? Who was President Washington’s secretary of the treasury? Who was his deputy secretary of the treasury? In 250 words, describe General Benedict Arnold’s motivation for betraying the Continental Army. Now do it in 500 words.

Stopping to think between questions, Mr. Melville stroked his bushy white beard, singing happily to himself. “Raindrops on something and something on kittens… something some something…”

“Harry? You have a visitor.”

Easing nervously into the room, Ida Finkleman nodded a polite thank-you to Sally Ann Melville while the hardest teacher in school waved her into a chair.

“Why, Ms. Finkleman!” Mr. Melville bellowed affably. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She looked a bit taken aback by his good spirits. “Um, well… you’ve been at the school a long time, and I thought you could help me. You see, I’d like to help out some students of mine.”

Mr. Melville’s famous eyebrows, white and thick as an arctic forest, arranged themselves into two skeptical arches. “Now why,” he asked, “would you want to do that?”

But as it turned out, Mr. Melville did know a way to help. Exactly as Ms. Finkleman had suspected, the gruff old social studies teacher, at some point in his many years of teaching, had heard of a certain program. “Well, not really a program,” said Mr. Melville, digging an old, yellowed pamphlet from a drawer of the rolltop desk. “It’s just this man from St. Louis. A man with a lot of money.”

Mr. Melville cautioned her that the Piccolini-Provokovsky grant had no formal application process, and that he had never heard of anyone actually winning it. In other words, he said, the whole thing was silly. “But as a wise man once said,” he concluded, referring to himself, “your days on this earth belong to you, and are yours to waste.”

And so, at 10:30 p.m., Ms. Finkleman was in her brown bathrobe, in her cozy recliner with her computer open on her lap, sipping a cup of Sleepytime tea and composing an email to a very rich man from St. Louis named Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky. She labored over this email, writing and rewriting, trying to get it perfect.